The entire work is made out of two pots of paint this size.
And that's something that fascinates me about painting. It fascinates me that if you painted the wall solidly with that you might only get a very small area.
But that when you approach that material in a slightly different way the possibilities are infinite.
We showed a work of Richard's which he'd painted on the walls of the Gallery of Modern Art way back in 1997
and then after we opened the Dean Gallery in 1999 we started thinking how could we represent Richard in a permanent way?
There's a long tradition of artists painting in stairwells in lots of country houses and palaces and we thought this is the obvious place to choose.
Architecture is a big word and it implies a kind of abstract thinking about the built world.
In this particular building it's strikingly solid as a piece of architecture with this Doric squareness and it also has these extraordinary beautiful details
and then it has this history as well which is something of a melancholic hsitory really.
As I've got to know the building, that aspect of it has crept into my thinking,
not necessarily the thinking about the work but it's something that I've been aware of.
I mean the work that I've made is as much for the people who were here before as the people who may come here in the future.
When it comes to making the actual work itself, you know you begin with something simple,
you know you think, well I'm going to work from this and it's going to unfold in this way
and then you hit a complex piece of cornicing or something or a fold or a change or a return
and then these things start to impose themselves on the work
and for me, actually, that's when the work begins, you know
it begins at that place where in a way all these things collide.
First of all they paper-up a drawing which has got tiny holes in it that he then chalks
which creates these lines within which he then draws the motif over and over and over again
and all these individual processes are physically and mentally very demanding, they take a long time
and within such a complicated space as the stairwell they took an extra long time.
The work essentially is made of a series of lines, you know
lines which measure out the wall but they measure it at different scales, the scale is in perspective
and what takes place is, instead of a series of lines, you see a series of curves
and that particular dimension was the thing that I chose to play with
to try a little bit to work with something that had the sort of fragility or possibility to kind of break down that space a little bit, to disturb it.
It's hard for me to know how it will be seen but I like the idea that perhaps some people, even with a work of this scale,
might not notice it
and that's not for the sake of being obscure or difficult, not at all
but I'm interested in the act of looking
you know you may almost glance upon absent-mindedly
you might not even register that it's there
I'm not really wanting the audience to be directed, I think that's the thing.
I mean it's incredibly subtle despite its scale,
you do only chance upon it when you're going up the stairs.
I think that's what's exciting about this work, that people will stumble across it
and it's as if it's magically appeared.
I mean I think even when we took the scaffolding down it felt as if it had just always been there
I think that's the most amazing thing about his practice is that he can make things
seem as though they should already exist there
and I think that piece really does.